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Credit Yunghi Kim

A Rubber Ducky Takes Flight(s)

By Yunghi KimJun. 7, 2010Jun. 7, 2010

A decade ago, my young niece Tasha Kim made a two-inch rubber ducky applique for me. I began taking it along on assignments around the world. It joined other essentials in my field pouch like extra camera batteries, flash cards, Swiss Army knife, toilet paper, notebook, granola bar, bottled water and luck.

That ducky has been present at many historical moments. It was with me when I witnessed women voting for the first time in Afghanistan. It was once a few feet away from President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan at his palace in Kabul. It was with me when I crazily walked into northern Iraq from Turkey — at night, in monsoonlike rain — just before the bombing started. The ducky visited Saddam Hussein’s palace in Tikrit before the Marines arrived.

It was with me in the birthplaces of two popes: Wadowice, Poland, and Marktl am Inn, Germany. The ducky has made a five-hour climb in the middle of the night on Buddha’s birthday to the top of Sri Pada in Sri Lanka, where it is said Buddha left a footprint.

And I’ve recorded the ducky’s peregrinations. As Tasha grew up, she started to be curious about what I did as a photographer, having no idea — in her Connecticut home — why her aunt would often be away for weeks or months, sometimes departing at a moment’s notice.

So if I had a spare moment, I would hold the applique in front of the camera, at one corner, and shoot a couple of frames with a 24-millimeter lens, showing the ducky in its latest context. (When I took out the ducky at President Karzai’s palace, his security guards got nervous because they couldn’t figure out what I was doing.) Later, after transmitting my photos for business, I’d send a ducky image to my brother. He’d then show it to Tasha — unless there were guns in the picture, in which case he’d only show it to his colleagues.

Tasha saw the more peaceful images. She and her father would often look on the map to find where the ducky and I were. I’d like to think these postcards to Tasha not only helped her with geography but opened her eyes to the world — and how far a little ducky can go in it.

Yunghi Kim is a freelance photographer based in New York. She began her career at The Patriot Ledger in Quincy, Mass., then moved to The Boston Globe, where she was a staff photographer for seven years. She was a finalist in 1993 for the Pulitzer Prize in feature photography, for her coverage of the famine in Somalia. She was a member of Contact Press Images from 1995 to 2008. Ms. Kim said she is proudest of her documentation of South Korean women who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese army in World War II.